Lincoln Startup Week to celebrate city’s startups Sept. 7-13

Lincoln startups will have a chance to showcase their endeavors and meet the community with a weeklong celebration of startups at the upcoming Lincoln Startup Week Sept. 7-13.

The event will kick off with the inaugural Startup Weekend Lincoln from the Sept. 7-9. There, as at other Startup Weekends, teams will work to turn ideas into the foundations of viable businesses over the course of 54 hours.

Four days of events to showcase the entrepreneurial activity in Lincoln will follow on the heels of Startup Weekend. Startup Week, from Sept. 10-13, will feature speakers, a pitch competition with a $1,000 prize, “Office Hours” in which entrepreneurs can speak one-on-one with service professionals, and a Tech Crawl led by the AIM Institute and NUtech Ventures.

The week will be anchored by a Tech Crawl on the 13th, which will allow tech startups in the Haymarket to hold open houses, perform demos and promote job openings. A closing party will cap off the event at 7 p.m. where companies will be encouraged to wear company T-shirts and continue networking.

Matt Sherman(left), co-founder of Mobile Truckr and president of Three Pillars Media, said he helped organize the event along with Bart Dillashaw, the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce and participating companies in order to shed light on the Lincoln startup community. “The startup community in Lincoln is kind of hidden,” he said. “I just meant to bring it to the surface.”

Sherman said he felt Lincoln startups could also benefit from the event because many are hiring.

Lincoln Startup Week has been in the works since June, Sherman said, and will be the first startup-focused weeklong event hosted in the capital city.

“Some of these pieces have been done before – the quick pitch competition, a speaker or events like that — but this is the first time we’re doing a tech crawl and those types of things,” Sherman said.